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Racial Disparities in Healthcare

The Racial Divide in American Medicine: Black Physicians and the Struggle for Justice in Health Care

By: Richard deShazo

The Racial Divide in American Medicine documents the struggle for equity in health and health care by African Americans in Mississippi and the United States and the connections between what happened there and the national search for social justice in health care. Dr. Richard D. deShazo and the contributors to the volume trace the dark journey from a system of slave hospitals in the state, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights era, to the present day. They substantiate that current health disparities are directly linked to America’s history of separation, neglect, struggle, and disparities.

An American Crisis: The Growing Absence of Black Men in Medicine and Science; Proceedings of a Joint Workshop

Black men are increasingly underrepresented in medical schools and in the medical profession. A diverse workforce is a key attribute of quality healthcare and research suggests that a diverse workforce may help to advance cultural competency and increase access to high-quality health care, especially for underserved populations. Conversely, lack of diversity in the health workforce threatens health care quality and access and contributes to health disparities. In this way, the growing absence of Black men in medicine is especially troubling, because their absence in medicine may have adverse consequences for health care access, quality, and outcomes among Black Americans and Americans overall.

Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism

By: John Hoberman

Black & Blue is the first systematic description of how American doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of thinking affects the treatment of their black patients. The standard studies of medical racism examine past medical abuses of black people and do not address the racially motivated thinking and behaviors of physicians practicing medicine today. Black & Blue penetrates the physician’s private sphere where racial fantasies and misinformation distort diagnoses and treatments. Doctors have always absorbed the racial stereotypes and folkloric beliefs about racial differences that permeate the general population. Within the world of medicine this racial folklore has infiltrated all of the medical sub-disciplines, from cardiology to gynecology to psychiatry.

Inequality and African-American Health: How Racial Disparities Create Sickness

By: Shirley Hill

This book shows how living in a highly racialized society affects health through multiple social contexts, including neighborhoods, personal and family relationships, and the medical system. Black-white disparities in health, illness, and mortality have been widely documented, but most research has focused on single factors that produce and perpetuate those disparities, such as individual health behaviors and access to medical care. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive perspective on health and sickness among African Americans, starting with an examination of how race has been historically constructed in the US and in the medical system and the resilience of racial ideologies and practices.

Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation

By: Gretchen Long

For enslaved and newly freed African Americans, attaining freedom and citizenship without health for themselves and their families would have been an empty victory. Even before emancipation, African Americans recognized that control of their bodies was a critical battleground in their struggle for autonomy, and they devised strategies to retain at least some of that control. In Doctoring Freedom, Gretchen Long tells the stories of African Americans who fought for access to both medical care and medical education, showing the important relationship between medical practice and political identity.

Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care

By: Dayna Bowen Matthew

Over 84,000 black and brown lives are needlessly lost each year due to health disparities: the unfair, unjust, and avoidable differences between the quality and quantity of health care provided to Americans who are members of racial and ethnic minorities and care provided to whites. Health disparities have remained stubbornly entrenched in the American health care system—and in Just Medicine Dayna Bowen Matthew finds that they principally arise from unconscious racial and ethnic biases held by physicians, institutional providers, and their patients.

Caring for Equality: A History of African American Health and Healthcare

By: David McBride

African Americans today continue to suffer disproportionately from heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems. In Caring for Equality David McBride chronicles the struggle by African Americans and their white allies to improve poor black health conditions as well as inadequate medical care—caused by slavery, racism, and discrimination—since the arrival of African slaves in America. Black American health progress resulted from the steady influence of what David McBride calls the health equality ideal: the principle that health of black Americans could and should be equal to that of whites and other Americans.

Seeing Patients: A Surgeon’s Story of Race and Medical Bias

By: Augustus White

Growing up in Jim Crow–era Tennessee and training and teaching in overwhelmingly white medical institutions, Gus White witnessed firsthand how prejudice works in the world of medicine. While race relations have changed dramatically since then, old ways of thinking die hard. In this blend of memoir and manifesto, Dr. White draws on his experience as a resident at Stanford Medical School, a combat surgeon in Vietnam, and head orthopedic surgeon at one of Harvard’s top teaching hospitals to make sense of the unconscious bias that riddles medical care, and to explore how we can do better in a diverse twenty-first-century America.

Blacks in Medicine: Clinical, Demographic, and Socioeconomic Correlations

By: Richard Allen Williams

This socially conscious, culturally relevant book explores the little-known history and present climate of Black people in the medical field. It reveals the deficiencies in the American healthcare structure that have contributed to the mismanagement of healthcare in the Black population, and examines cross-currents that intersect with the major events in minority medical history.

Flatlining: Race, Work, and Health Care in the New Economy

By: Adia Wingfield

What happens to black health care professionals in the new economy, where work is insecure and organizational resources are scarce? In Flatlining, Adia Harvey Wingfield exposes how hospitals, clinics, and other institutions participate in "racial outsourcing," relying heavily on black doctors, nurses, technicians, and physician assistants to do "equity work"-extra labor that makes organizations and their services more accessible to communities of color. Wingfield argues that as these organizations become more profit driven, they come to depend on black health care professionals to perform equity work to serve increasingly diverse constituencies. Yet black workers often do this labor without recognition, compensation, or support. Operating at the intersection of work, race, gender, and class, Wingfield makes plain the challenges that black employees must overcome and reveals the complicated issues of inequality in today's workplaces and communities.

Racial Justice, Business & Industry

Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching

By: Paula J. Giddings

From a thinker, Paula J. Giddings, who Maya Angelou has praised for shining “a brilliant light on the lives of women left in the shadow of history,” comes the definitive biography of Ida B. Wells—crusading journalist and pioneer in the fight for women’s suffrage and against segregation and lynchings. Ida B. Wells was born into slavery and raised in the Victorian age yet emerged—through her fierce political battles and progressive thinking—as the first “modern” black women in the nation’s history.

Killing Rage: Ending Racism

By: Bell Hooks

One of our country's premier cultural and social critics, Bell Hooks has always maintained that eradicating racism and eradicating sexism must go hand in hand. But whereas many women have been recognized for their writing on gender politics, the female voice has been all but locked out of the public discourse on race. Killing Rage speaks to this imbalance. These twenty-three essays are written from a black and feminist perspective, and they tackle the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it.

Our Black Year

By: Maggie Anderson

Maggie and John Anderson were successful African American professionals raising two daughters in a tony suburb of Chicago. But they felt uneasy over their good fortune. Most African Americans live in economically starved neighborhoods. Black wealth is about one tenth of white wealth, and black businesses lag behind businesses of all other racial groups in every measure of success. One problem is that black consumers–unlike consumers of other ethnicities– choose not to support black-owned businesses. At the same time, most of the businesses in their communities are owned by outsiders.

The Person You Mean to Be

By: Dolly Chugh

An inspiring guide from Dolly Chugh, an award-winning social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business, on how to confront difficult issues including sexism, racism, inequality, and injustice so that you can make the world (and yourself) better. Many of us believe in equality, diversity, and inclusion. But how do we stand up for those values in our turbulent world? The Person You Mean to Be is the smart, "semi-bold" person’s guide to fighting for what you believe in.

Erasing Institutional Bias

Erasing Institutional Bias

By: Tiffany Jana

All humans have bias, and as a result, so do the institutions we build. Diversity consultant Tiffany Jana offers concrete ways for anyone to work against institutional bias no matter what their position is in an organization. While it is easy to identify intentionally built systems of oppression like Jim Crow or the paralysis caused by the glass ceiling for women in the workplace, confronting systems that perpetuate subtle, unconscious bias is much harder. Erasing Institutional Bias will help people tackle structural bias regardless of their positional power.

Routledge Studies in the History of Marketing

Pioneering African-American Women in the Advertising Business

By: Judy Foster Davis

Much has been written about the men and women who shaped the field of advertising, some of whom became legends in the industry. However, the contributions of African-American women to the advertising business have largely been omitted from these accounts. Yet, evidence reveals that some trailblazing African-American women who launched their careers during the 1960s Mad Men era went on to achieve prominent careers. This unique book chronicles the nature and significance of these women’s accomplishments, examines the opportunities and challenges they experienced, and explores how they coped with the extensive inequities common in the advertising profession.

Race, Work, and Leadership

Race, Work, & Leadership

By: Laura Morgan Roberts, Anthony Mayo, David Thomas and Lakshmi Ramarajan

Race, Work, and Leadership is a rare and important compilation of essays that examines how race matters in people's experience of work and leadership. What does it mean to be black in corporate America today? How are racial dynamics in organizations changing in a post-Obama era? How do we build inclusive organizations? Inspired by and developed in conjunction with the research and programming for Harvard Business School's 2018 celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the HBS African American Student Union, this groundbreaking book shines new light on these and other timely questions and illuminates the present-day dynamics of race in the workplace.

Routledge Studies in the History of Marketing

The Color of Law

By: Richard Rothstein

Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes it clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

The Hidden Cost of Being African American

The Hidden Cost of Being African American

By: Thomas Shaprio

Over the past three decades, racial prejudice in America has declined significantly and many African American families have seen a steady rise in employment and annual income. But alongside these encouraging signs, Thomas Shapiro argues in The Hidden Cost of Being African American, fundamental levels of racial inequality persist, particularly in the area of asset accumulation--inheritance, savings accounts, stocks, bonds, home equity, and other investments.

Race & Racial Justice

The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow

By: Michelle Alexander

Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me

By: Ta-Nehisi, Coates

In the one hundred fifty years since the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, the story of race and America has remained a brutally simple one, written on flesh: It is the story of the black body, exploited to create the country’s foundational wealth, violently segregated to unite a nation after a civil war, and, today, still disproportionately threatened, locked up, and killed in our streets. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all—regardless of race—honestly reckon with our country’s fraught racial history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer those questions, presented in the form of a letter to his adolescent son.

Waking up White

Waking Up White

By: Debby Irving

For twenty-five years, Debby Irving sensed inexplicable racial tensions in her personal and professional relationships. As a colleague and neighbor, she worried about offending people she dearly wanted to befriend. As an arts administrator, she didn't understand why her diversity efforts lacked traction. As a teacher, she found her best efforts to reach out to students and families of color left her wondering what she was missing. Then, in 2009, one "aha!" moment launched an adventure of discovery and insight that drastically shifted her worldview and upended her life plan.”

Not Light, but Fire

Not Light, but Fire

By: Matthew Kay

Matthew Kay has spent his career learning how to lead students through the most difficult race conversations. He not only makes the case that classrooms are one of the best places to have those conversations, but he also offers a method for getting them right.

Hood Feminism

By: Mikki Kendall

In her collection of essays, Mikki Kendall takes aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Drawing on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hyper sexualization, along with incisive commentary on politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, and more, Hood Feminism delivers an irrefutable indictment of a movement in flux. Kendall has written a ferocious clarion call to all would-be feminists to live out the true mandate of the movement in thought and in deed.

Stamped from the Beginning

Stamped from the Beginning

By: Ibram X. Kendi

Some Americans insist that we’re living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America–it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history.

They Can’t Kill Us All

They Can’t Kill Us All

By: Wesley Lowery

Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today.

The Origin of Others

The Origin of Others

By: Toni Morrison

America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others.

So You Want to Talk about Race

So You Want to Talk about Race

By: Iieoma Oluo

Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy–from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans–has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair–and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?